BirdDogICT

One of my favorite Carlin routines is "The Ice Box Man" "Perhaps the worst thing that can happen is to reach into the refrigerator and come out with something that you cannot identify at all. You literally do not know what it is. Could be meat, could be cake. Usually, at a time like that, I'll bluff. "Honey, is this good?" "Well, what is it?" "I don't know. I've never seen anything like it. It looks like...meatcake!" "Well, smell it." (snort, sniff) "It has absolutely no smell whatsoever!" "It's good! Put it back! Somebody is saving it. It'll turn up in something." So the year 2013 could be meat, could be cake...we win, either way.

I should have known I was hanging out with a bunch of old farts with your references to hernia belts, PSA levels, and quality of your (sometimes daily) bowel movements. Not to mention your...oh hell...where was I? Oh yeah, I'll be 60 this summer. I'll be celebrating it on my new bike.

Battle of Britain 2.11 is a joy to fly, although the graphics are a bit dated (mch like IL2 1946). I'm waiting for the 2.12 upgrade...looks to be a big leap forward. It's not an accident that some of the best sims currently available are mods (e.g., OFF, BOBII).

I rode yesterday for a few hours when it was 34 degrees and crosswind at 25. Typical Kansas winter day. Not bad when you have heated grips, heated seat, and exhaust heater blowing across your feet. Will ride all winter as long as the roads aren't slick and the deer aren't mating. I have a CH FigheterStick, ProThrottle, and ProPedals, and had trouble controlling BS when it came out several years ago, so lost interest quickly. I've now changed the stick curves and sensitivity, so my inputs are more subtle, and I'm more careful with trimming. I finally realized that this is a single pilot machine with a high workload, and you need to use the various autopilots to your advantage. Much more fun now that I can control it. Haven't modded my CH kit...ten years of hard use, and it's still like new.

Sounds like you have gone completely over to the dark side. We're alike...I have more fun tweaking my machine for sims than actually flying them. I'm sure you'll get it sorted. I haven't played much with drive images or SSDs lately, and took a break from sims for the summer. I enjoy a bit of wrenching, and was spending so much time in the garage maintaining my old Goldwing that my wife recently announced that I needed to trade up. Whenever the Spousal Approval Light is on, you have to act fast, so I went out last week and bought a slightly used 2010 Goldwing (shown in my avatar). That has freed up a lot of my fiddling around time, and now that it's getting cold enough to cut my riding time down, I'll get back into sims for a few months. Currently learning Black Shark..have had it for a while, but never committed to learning it. That should keep me busy until Spring or until WOFF comes out. Thanks again for the Wings of Glory files. That put a nostalgic grin on my face for a month. Best regards, Bird Dog

Welcome back. I've been where you're at, and it just sucks. I've had some huge setbacks in my life, and they were damn painful, but they made me the successful, happy man I am now because no matter how tough things were and no matter how long it took, I believed that I could make my life better. As Abraham Lincoln, a famous melancholic, wrote: " A man is about as happy as he decides to be." So find what makes you happy, even if it's flying BHaH with a snoot full of Jameson. I'm doing the same tonight...I had a good day, worked around the house, sang Carmina Burana with the local symphony tonight, came home to a loving wife, had a couple shots of Maker's Mark, flew a short mission, and now it's off ot bed to snuggle. Life is good. As one of my British friends used to say, "Keep your pecker up!"

I just upgraded my two year old budget AM3 build with Faster quad core running at 4.0 MHz (compared to a dual core running at 3.4. FWIW, extra cores don't make any difference, as OFF uses only one core, but raw speed matters); ATI 7870 graphics card (upgrading from an ATI 5770 doubled my GPU performance). I am now running everything on max graphics settings and am blown away by how much better the experience is. Winder's scenery is amazing. And more computing power seems to make the aircraft flight models more challenging and realistic. Can't wait for WOFF now!!

Olham, Now that the prices on the 7870 have come down, they give a lot of bang for the buck (I paid $209.99 after rebate for a XFX Double Dissipation). Whisper quiet, even at full load. Doesn't require a lot of power, either. My 750W power supply has plenty of power to spare. I'm running all sliders at 5, no tweaks, Workshop settings at max, and my Catalyst settings are 8X AA, 8X AF, Catalyst AI at High Quality, Super-sample AA, and get 35-40 FPS sitting on the runway, and 50-60 in the air. If I turn the AA down to Multi-Sample, and Workshop ground object density to medium, FPS stays near 60 in flight and never drops below 40. Your mileage may vary, but the 7870 was a very dramatic improvement in performance and enjoyment.

Tuba2 I use the same HOTAS devices with BHaH, but haven't had any problems using Control Manager v4.52 with XP or Win7 64 bit. However, Are you using a powered USB hub or the USB ports from the motherboard? Powered USB hubs occasionally give CH devices the fits. If using USB ports powered through the motherboard, are they USB v2.0? USB recognition in the CH software can get wonky if you are moving devices from one port to another. I've had issues with that before, and the simplest way to fix it is to unplug all of your CH devices, uninstall CH Control Manager, and reinstall everything, strictly following the directions http://www.ch-hangar.com/forum/showthread.php?6196-Control-Manager-v4.51-Posted (only takes about half an hour or so). Once installed, I NEVER unplug one of my CH devices. I see that Bob Church offered some of the same advice...he's definitely the expert. Hope this helps. Your mileage may vary.

Fun to watch. Was a little put off by the title: Ton Gun is not as interesting as Top Gun.

Thanks for making it happen, Cap'n.

It now appears to be the official Uncle Al forum

Mike, There has been a lot of discussion about the white triangles with TrackIR, with ATI cards (see this thread http://combatace.com...st-version-112/). Whether using ATI or Nvidia, it all boils down to video fill rates. There are a number of settings that can reduce the workload of your video card: the most obvious ones are reducing terrain and scenery sliders and Workshop settings, as Olham mentioned. You can also try using VSync and/or reducing TrackIR panning speed (set to .7 or .8 from within the TrackIR software), or switch to post-process AA (Morphological AA is an ATI feature...NVidia is working on it, I believe, but not supported by your card) You can probably improve performance with an older card like yours by setting AA to 2X or 4X within the game and turning off AA and AF in the NVidia Control Panel. You don't need very much AA in BHaH to make it look great.

Just in case, I think I'll keep my options open by keeping my membership at SimHQ.

Can't say I ever liked Pavarotti all that much. For my money, no one can top Jussi Boerling...similar to Fischer Dieskau in technique. Few tenors can manage Boerling's ability to maintain the same tone production throughout their range. Boerling was the only tenor Enrico Caruso's widow felt worthy of access to her late husband's archives.

Strong verbs were easy, but weak and mixed verbs were a bitch to memorize. Not to mention bestimmte und unbestimmte artikel. Thirty times harder is right. BTW, All of Germany should be in mourning for the passing of Dietrich Fischer Dieskau last Friday. One of my heroes. Saw him perform in Phoenix, Arizona in 1972 and have never heard another baritone that could hold a candle to him. Still regularly listen to his many German lieder recordings. Fantastik!!

Even at high resolutions the pixel count can't match real life. Consequently, unless the objects are quite large, a computer screen doesn't trigger the few thin layers of brain cells that are organized around the tasks of detecting movement or differences in object/ground relationships. Requires a lot of training to condition yourself to detect EA without a TAC.

Gearing seems to be more common with modified VW engines, something I'm not interested in. Leaning more toward a 9-cylinder Rotec engine. I need to take my time in planning this purchase...haven't even completed the Spousal Approval Certificate yet. I'm pretty certain that any reputable replica kit supplier will require one. May take more time than the FAA approvals.

Not wishing to go off topic here, but have been seriously exploring building a replica...I'm very far from an expert, but from what I've been able to determine, reduction gearing offers the following benefits with a fixed prop: As a propeller tip speed increases the efficiency decreases. The larger the diameter of the propeller the more effective disk area it has. To increase disk area is to increase thrust. It is common practice to decrease the diameter of the propeller to increase its rpm to get more horsepower from the engine. As a general rule of thumb if you increase the engines rpm that will increase its horsepower. If you reduce that rpm by half thru a reduction unit you will double the torque output of the engine. Horsepower is not the determining factor for sizing a propeller. Torque is the determining factor for sizing a propeller. It is more efficient to go with the larger diameter propeller at a lower rpm. If you increase a propellers diameter from 60" to 84" it will increase its effective disk area by 96%. Any increase in the props effective disk area will increase its output. The big question: if the above is true, why didn't more planes utilize it? From what I can determine, they sized the prop to maximize thrust, based on the torque provided by the engine. Was gear reduction simply a cheap and easy way to maximize the use of their existing inventory?

I'm far from an expert on Japanese military history, but considering that 1) when the emperor is god, 2) and the Bushido tradition requires unquestioning loyalty to one's daimyo or feudal lord, 3) and the emporer's generals dictate a "Divine Wind" to obliterate the Americans, 4) it was considered an honor to participate.. I wouldn't kill myself for my political leaders...hell, I wouldn't vote for half of them.

No one has mentioned Akira Kurosawa's martial masterpieces (in no particular order). Throne of Blood (Kurosawa's retelling of Macbeth) Kagemusha (based on the Daimyo Takeda Shingen and the Battle of Nagashino) Seven Samurai (the inspiration for "The Magnificent Seven") Yojimbo (the inspiration for Sergio Leone's "A Fistful of Dollars") Sanjuro Ran (Kurosawa's retelling of King Lear) The Hidden Fortress (inspiration for George Lucas' "Star Wars")

I feel the same way.

The dealbreaker question for me is: Can I fly the seaplanes AND sport a really great scarf at the same time? I don't want to take the time to make airplane skins, but could really enjoy skinning some scarves.

As per the Fraps help file, when you activate the "Benchmarking Hotkey", it saves Benchmarking statistics between activations of the Benchmarking Hotkey. You also have the option of using the "Stop benchmark automatically" option, which allows you to specify a fixed duration for the benchmark. Once the number of seconds has elapsed the benchmark will automatically stop and the results will be written to disk. Detailed benchmark statistics can also be saved to disk. These are written in standard CSV files that can be imported directly into a spreadsheet. All files are automatically named/timestamped and saved in the benchmarks subdirectory. Currently there are 3 files written for each benchmark when this option is enabled: FPS - Contains the frame rate value for each second of the benchmark frametimes - Contains the time (in milliseconds) of every frame that was rendered in the benchmark minmaxavg - Contains the total frame count, benchmark duration, minimum, maximum, and average frame rate values.